Sunday, March 6, 2016

Well, so Nancy Reagan has died at age 94. I never liked her as an actress. Saw her in Donavan's Brain and The Next Voice You Hear and on a very special episode of Diff'rent Strokes. It wasn't her fault, but she had this big giant head.

Ronald Reagan addressed her as "Mommy".

She met Reagan when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Years later, she falsely claimed that there was another actress named Nancy Davis who was a member of the Communist Party, so Nancy went to Ronnie so as not to be blacklisted.

It was a lie. The other Nancy Davis was not in the Communist Party, and she pointed out that she had appeared in movies using the name Nancy Davis well before Nancy Reagan came along. Under the rules of the Screen Actors Guild, it was the then-future Mrs Reagan who had to change her name, but she was sleeping with the union's crooked president, so the original Nancy Davis was forced to adopt a new stage name.

Nancy was two months pregnant when she married Reagan.

Like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan was a Goldwater supporter.

Her son, Ron, Jr., was best friends with Eric Douglas, the son of Kirk Douglas. They were going to take Eric along when they went to the ranch one weekend, but Eric saw the Goldwater bumper stickers on the Reagan family station wagon and said, "Boooo, Goldwater."

Nancy flew into a rage. She called Kirk Douglas's wife, Anne, to come pick him up, and the Reagan family drove away leaving Eric with the housekeeper. He was five-years-old. Rather impressive he could read the name "Goldwater".

During the Bush, Jr, years, you had to feel for Laura Bush having spent all those years married to an alcoholic and having that horrible mother-in-law. Laura was the only member of the First Family who didn't have a criminal record--her husband and daughters had all been convicted on drunk charges. But I could never work up any sympathy for Nancy Reagan.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

I didn't want them but I bought some Girl Scout cookies. What could I do? The girls probably wouldn't care, but I'd feel guilty if I didn't.

I've bought stuff from Boy Scouts even though I'm anti-Boy Scout. Even when I was a kid I didn't approve of the Boy Scouts.

But the last time I went past a table where they were selling Boy Scout stuff, the Boy Scout didn't say anything to me, his mother didn't say anything to me. I wasn't avoiding eye contact with them. They just looked at me and either thought I was impoverished or that I would lash out at them for barring gays and atheists from their organization. I was rather hurt. Like the time I had a brief but pleasant conversation with a couple of Mormon missionaries and then they just walked off having made no attempt to convert me. I could literally burn in hell for all they cared.

Then there was the time some high school kids were having a car wash fundraiser. I had them wash my car. The car was old and in kind of bad shape. Two hubcaps were missing, the paint was peeling, the door handle was broken. I had a couple of large trash bags full of bottles inside and the car was full of other crap. And it was my day off so I wasn't terribly well-groomed.

There was no set price for the car wash---just a donation and that was optional. When they were done, they walked off and seemed to assume that I wasn't going to pay them and I realized that they thought I lived in the car. So I paid them more than a real car wash would have cost. Made them think I was a wealthy eccentric.

So yesterday I bought some Girl Scout cookies. I told them to keep the change as a donation. The mom cheerfully told me that they use the donations to buy Girl Scout cookies to send to the troops. I didn't want to pay for Girl Scout cookies for the troops---I wanted to donate money to the Girl Scouts. For the children. But I thought, well, okay.